VI
The last phase of the school may be studied in the work of Alice Brown, representative of the influences at the end of the century. The late recognition of her fiction—she was born in 1857—which placed her a decade after Miss Wilkins who was born in 1862, compelled her to serve an apprenticeship like that of Howells, and subjected her work to the new shaping influences of the nineties. When she did gain recognition in 1895, she brought a finished art. She had mastered the newly worked-out science of the short story, she had studied the English masters—chiefest of all Stevenson, whose influence so dominated the closing century.
She was not a realist as Miss Wilkins was a realist. The New England dialect stories of Meadow Grass were not put forth to indicate the final field that she had chosen for her art: they were experiments just as all the others of her earlier efforts were experiments. Of her first seven books, Fools of Nature, with its background of spiritualism, was a serious attempt at serious fiction with a thesis worthy of a George Eliot, Mercy Warren and Robert Louis Stevenson were biographical and critical studies, By Oak and Thorn was a collection of travel essays, The Road to Castelay was a collection of poems, and The Day of His Youth perhaps a romance.
That she won her recognition as a writer of dialect tales rather than as a novelist, a poet, an essayist, a romancer, was due, first, to the nature of the times, and, secondly, to the fact that the tales were a section of her own life written with fullness of knowledge and sympathy. She had been born and reared in a New Hampshire town, educated in a country school and a rural "female seminary," and, like Rose Terry Cooke, she had taught school. Later she had broken from this early area of her life and had resided in Boston. The glamour of childhood grew more and more golden over the life she had left behind her; the memories of fragrant summer evenings in the green country and of the old homes she had known with all their varied inmates grew ever more tender on her pages as she wrote. It was impossible for her not to be true to this area that she knew so completely. Characters like Mrs. Blair and Miss Dyer in "Joint Owners in Spain," or Farmer Eli in "Farmer Eli's Vacation" stood living before her imagination as she told of them. She had known them in the flesh. If she were to paint the picture at all she must paint it as it was in her heart. To add to it or to subtract from it were to violate truth itself.
Her stories differ from Mrs. Cooke's and Miss Jewett's in a certain quality of atmosphere—it is difficult to explain more accurately. They have a quality of humor and of pathos, a sprightliness and freedom about them that are all their own. They never fall into carelessness like so much of the work of Mrs. Stowe and they are never poorly constructed. They are photographically true to the life they represent, and yet they possess, many of them, the beauties and the graces and the feeling of romance. They add richness to realism. In style she is the antithesis of Miss Wilkins. There is beauty in all of her prose, a half-felt tripping of feet often, a lilting rhythm as unpremeditated as a bird-song, swift turns of expression that are near to poetry. An inscription in the Tiverton churchyard halts her, and as she muses upon it she is wholly a poet:
"The purple flower of a maid"! All the blossomy sweetness, the fragrant lament of Lycidas, lies in that one line. Alas, poor love-lies-bleeding! And yet not poor according to the barren pity we accord the dead, but dowered with another youth set like a crown upon the unstained front of this. Not going with sparse blossoms ripened or decayed, but heaped with buds and dripping over in perfume. She seems so sweet in her still loveliness, the empty province of her balmy spring, that, for a moment fain are you to snatch her back into the pageant of your day. Reading that phrase, you feel the earth is poorer for her loss. And yet, not so, since the world holds other greater worlds as well. Elsewhere she may have grown to age and stature, but here she lives yet in beauteous permanence—as true a part of youth and joy and rapture as the immortal figures on the Grecian urn. While she was but a flying phantom on the frieze of time, Death fixed her there forever—a haunting spirit in perennial bliss.
Whenever she touches nature she touches it as a poet. She was of the mid nineties which saw the triumph of the nature school. Behind each of her stories lies a rich background of mountain or woodland or meadow, one that often, as in "A Sea Change," dominates in Thomas Hardy fashion the whole picture.
Only a comparatively few of Miss Brown's volumes deal with the field with which her name is chiefly associated. Meadow Grass, Tiverton Tales, and The Country Road contain the best of her dialect stories. Her heart in later years has been altogether in other work. She has written novels not provincial in their setting, and, unlike Miss Wilkins, she has succeeded in doing really distinctive work. She has the constructive power that is denied so many, especially women, who have succeeded with the short story. She has done dramatic work which has won high rewards and she has written poetry. Perhaps she is a poet first of all.